e have had democracy in this country for
one hundred and twenty-five years, or indeed for two hundred and
twenty-five years. It is now proposed to have more democracy to supply
the present defects of our existing democracy. This is one phase of the
present situation that I wish to discuss. Another is the spread of the
fraternal spirit, the desire of one to help another, the actual
improvement and increase in the brotherhood of man which we are seeing
in society, and a third is trades-unionism, its essence and what is to
be hoped for or feared from it.

If you will read a book like Chamberlain on "The Foundations of the
Nineteenth Century," especially the preface, which is written by a man
who uses a better style than Chamberlain, you will find that he attempts
to summarize the progress of the previous eighteen centuries as a
predicate for the strides of human civilization in the nineteenth. As he
minimizes the effect of one century and then another, you note how few
centuries, in his judgment, play any part in the onward march, and you
are discouraged as to what one man can do to help along any movement
that shall really be world-wide or permanent.

The effect is much the same upon your personal hope of accomplishing
some good in the world as when a professor of astronomy takes you over
to the observatory, lets you look through the telescope, tells you that
light takes something like eight minutes to come the 95,000,000 miles
from the sun to the earth, and then says that the sun after all is a
pretty poor thing considered in connection with what other suns there
are. When you find furthermore that some stars are so far distant that
the light you are now receiving on your retina started from them
centuries ago, you say to yourself: "Well, what's the use? If we are
such atoms and so unimportant in the general result, what's the use?"

Still if you study Chamberlain's history of the eighteen centuries you
will find that, after all, the men who were real factors in the world
civilization were the geniuses who were able to interpret and enforce
what was inchoate in the minds of all but had no definite expression and
led to no useful action. Each atom counts something, two make a molecule
and the world is made up of them--at least it was in my college days.
Therefore, what we are here for is to make the best possible effort to
help along the general weal, and it is no excuse, because we cannot play
a large part, that we sho